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It is here I will ask the same question asked of Muslims every time a Muslim some place in the world commits a crime. Where are the moderate Germans I ask? Where are the moderate Westerners? Where is their outrage at the acts of hate by one of their own? Why is the burden of being outraged at the actions of “one of our own” only placed on Muslims? Why can we not expect fellow Germans as complicit in some manner as all Muslims are assumed to be complicit?
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Nick Davies on how the News of the World was involved in illegal activity, from intercepting phone messages to buying confidential personal data
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Westerners have come to view the plight of Tibetans and Uighurs as simply the latest in an ugly continuum of Chinese human rights abuses, most visible in Tiananmen Square two decades ago. But the story is actually much more strategic than ideological. Tibet and Xinjiang are as crucial to China’s claims to unity and sovereignty as Taiwan is: weakness from within would undermine its global power projection. In the midst of a worldwide recession, many observers believe China will face not just unrest but major instability. Yet this drastically underestimates the Communist party’s grip on power and its long-term ambitions. China’s $2 trillion in foreign exchange reserves mean it can afford to nation-build, industrialise and play geopolitics at the same time. If you only started to care about the Tibetans and Uighurs when you saw the brutal crackdown of the March 2008 riots in Lhasa—when about 100 Tibetans were killed—then you woke up decades too late.
